My dreams changed. Before, I had rarely dreamed of any woman I had been attracted to in my waking life. I would dream of women I had glimpsed in passing, or of women I had never seen before, who might, for all I knew, have been nymphs or goddesses. Now I dreamed of Mattie Chatham, of her herself.
I told nobody. Nobody knew of it but me. That alone was a revelation. I had always made it a rule of thumb that there were no real secrets in Port William, but now I knew that this was not so. It was the secrets between people that got out. The secrets that people knew alone were the ones that were kept, the knowledge too painful or too dear to speak of. If so urging a thing as I now knew was known only to me, then what must other people know that they had never told? I felt a strange new respect for the heads I barbered. I knew that the dead carried with them out of this world things they could not give away.
From that moment up in the churchyard, Mattie Chatham became a demand and a trouble on my mind. I began to contrive (usually without success) to be near her. I wanted, as I would say to myself, to be in her presence, as if her presence were a fragrance, or a light that was within her and shone around her. And within this influence or power that I called her presence was Mattie herself, her palpable self, ripe and beautiful, unimagining, it seemed, within my fully awakened imagining of her, within my awareness unaware. There were times when my desire stood before me like a spoiled child, insisting that it should be given what it did not have—what it did not know it could not have.
Looking back, I still feel a kind of shame about that passage of my life. I ceased to be solitary (as, in a manner of speaking, I have always been) and became furtive, leading a secret life in my thoughts, which were always as urgent and unrefusable as a knock on the door late at night, and which always led straight to impossibilities that seemed nonetheless possible. I might as well have been back at the orphanage, surrounded by strangers and dreaming of home.
Thinking of Mattie, I began to imagine the intimacy of marriage, which I thought might be a name for admission into presence. In marriage, a man and a woman might come gladly into each other’s presence. This was something, I think, that would not have occurred to me in thinking of Clydie, who always consciously reserved something of herself. Clydie was always holding a high card that she wouldn’t play—or maybe couldn’t play, given her circumstances. But what moved me so toward Mattie was the sense that she withheld nothing; she was not a woman of defenses or devices. Though she might be divided in her affection and loyalty, within herself she was whole and clear. She would be wholly present within her presence.
But thinking of Mattie’s marriage, I saw too how a marriage, in bringing two people into each other’s presence, must include loneliness and error. I imagined a moment when the husband and wife realize that their marriage includes their faults, that they do not perfect each other, and that in making their marriage they also fail it and must carry to the grave things they cannot give away.
Thinking of Mattie’s marriage and of the certainty of pain and loneliness in it gave hope to my desire, which insisted upon itself without reference to anything else. One thing it did was make me think myself desirable. This love had come to stand beside me and it was mine because in certain respects it overruled me and I belonged to it. It wasn’t perfect in its mastery. I went on with my workaday life and my pleasures about as I had before. I allowed, I think, no change in appearances that would have been a giveaway. I hadn’t been a boy in a long time and was pretty firm in my habits. And yet I was changed.
Clydie saw it. She would say, patting me with her hand as if I were a horse, “Jayber, my poor old boy, where has your mind gone off to?” And she would give me a grin, seeing something, and yet only guessing, and yet hard to fool.
And I would say, “Oh, lovely Clydie, you know where my mind goes when it goes off”
And she would say, leaving her question aside, for it was her principle to claim no rights over me as a way of warning me to claim none over her, “Yes, my dear Jayber, I know one place.”
But for longer than I wish it had, my longing for Mattie Chatham held its hand over my thoughts and dreams and the visions of my mind, so that I was never satisfied for long and never much at rest.
Another thing it did was make Troy Chatham an object of fascination to me, second only to Mattie herself.
From watching Troy when he was more or less alone and when he was with other people, I knew that he was a lonely man, and I knew this without compassion. He was lonely because he could imagine himself as anything but himself and as anywhere but where he was. His competitiveness and self-centeredness cut him off from any thought of shared life. He wanted to have more because he thought that having more would make him able to live more, and he was lonely because he never thought of the sources, the places, where he was going to get what he wanted to have, or of what his having it might cost others. It was a loneliness that sometimes even he felt; you could see it. A self-praiser has got to accept a big loneliness in order to accept a little credit.
Another thing: Although he would laugh when he thought he should, he was just about completely humorless. He was a man you would rather not tell a sexual joke in front of, because he wouldn’t think it was funny; he would think it was interesting. It wouldn’t appeal to his sense of humor; it would appeal to his curiosity. He had a dirty mind. He could tell a sexual joke without seeing it was funny. He would laugh because he was supposed to, but he really thought he was passing on a piece of inside information, showing off his manhood and his knowledge.
Well, as I’ve said, I didn’t like him. I never had liked him, and now I didn’t just not like him; I hated him, and I found it a pleasure.
Of course, according to the freedom and democracy of my shop, I was obliged to serve him as I did all the rest, and I did this with the deference and obligingness that I reserved for the few clients I did not in one way or another enjoy. I didn’t wish to appear, even to myself, to be unwilling to do my duty. And yet when he occasionally asked for a shave in addition to a haircut, I could feel the razor’s edge tingle and itch with appreciation of the softness of his throat. This, you understand, was not a feeling that I exactly approved of. I felt it because it came to me, and I did my best to cover it up.
Even so, one day when Troy stepped, shorn and shaved and scented, out my door, I heard Burley Coulter say, “What you been doing?”
“Getting my ears lowered,” Troy said.
And Burley said, innocently I am sure, but I feared not, “You’re lucky you still got both of ’em.”
I felt accused and a little guilty, shaken in fact.
Burley came on in. “I need to get my hair cut bad,” he said.
And I said, glad of a reason to grin, “Well, that’s the way I cut it.”
The visions of the mind have a debt to reality that it is hard to get the mind to pay when it is under the influence of its visions. The lower Troy Chatham fell in my estimation, the better I thought of myself. And this was because of my overmastering feeling for Mattie. I was being carried away by a process of reasoning that was entirely invented by me and had nothing to do with anything in this world. I reasoned that if Troy was hateful to me, then he must be at least objectionable to Mattie, and she must want to be shed of him. I thought that if he was objectionable to her, then she might be attracted to me as one who truly loved and appreciated her. My thoughts returned again and again to that afternoon up in the churchyard when my feeling had declared itself to me and for a moment I had not been at myself, when she may have seen and understood. Did she know? I had reached a level of sophistication at which I could know I was fooling myself and still fool myself.
It embarrasses me to confess that such thoughts and their attendant visions possessed my mind for more than a year. It was a mercy when finally my vision grew so reckless and extravagant that even I could maintain it no longer.
This was in the October of the next year when the leaves had brightened to their brightest and had started to fall. Things
had reached a sort of culmination of badness down at the Keith place. No differences had ever been resolved between Troy and Athey. Troy’s power had only grown as Athey gave way, trying to secure Troy’s loyalty to the place at the place’s expense and to preserve the possibility of friendship between the two households. Every year the acreage of plowed land had increased. In 1950 there had been a change of tenants, and the new man bought a tractor. In Athey’s big feed barn there finally would be only a single team of mules—an old pair that Athey swore would die on the place rather than be sold.
All this, you see, appeared to excuse my supposing (by a logic purely glandular) that Mattie would like to be free of Troy. One evening, alone in the shop, sitting in the barber chair with a book lying open and forgotten on my lap, I all of a sudden saw in my mind a vision of Mattie and me running away together. We were in my old Zephyr and we were putting Port William behind us.
The incompleteness of the vision was the giveaway, and was what finally ruined it. Before we could have wound up running away, for instance, there would have had to be an understanding between us. I had not imagined that, and could not have. Mattie would have had to give me a look, a smile perhaps, of consent—and this, though the thought of it filled me with the pain of longing, I could not imagine. I could not imagine what we might have said to each other. Nor could I imagine where we were going or what we were going to do. There was just some border somewhere ahead of us that we yearned to cross. In my vision the two of us were just running. My old car, having caught our eagerness, was going down the river road very much faster than forty miles an hour, shuddering seemingly with its own excitement, a long plume of blue smoke rising behind. And I suppose that just this escaping, just this speed and this violence of exertion in a car’s engine, was the fullest expression of my love as I had understood it so far. As I drove the old car mercilessly toward wherever in the world we might have been going, piling one presumption on the top of another, I was saying to myself, or perhaps praying, “Why can the world not permit two lovers (any two) a moment of escape, free of all its claims, to be in love, just the two together, each the other’s all?”
What destroyed my vision and all such visions, removed me from the chambers of imagery and put me back in the world again, was the assumption (not supportable even by imagination) that Mattie would have consented to such a thing. The proposition that she might have consented was more daunting to me than the certainty that she would not have. It made me see.
Supposing she would have consented, I saw that what I would be asking of her would not be just that moment of abandon, the thought of which had so commanded me (imagination had spared me nothing of that), and not even just her love. I would have been asking for her life, for the power to change her into what could not be foreseen. If I destroyed what already existed, what would I replace it with? For something always exists before you get there with your desires and visions, and this simply had not occurred to me before in such a way that I could feel the truth of it. What did I have to offer?
If you love somebody enough, and long enough, finally you must see yourself. What I saw was a barber and grave digger and church janitor making half a living, a bachelor, a man about town, a friendly fellow. And this was perhaps acceptable, perhaps even creditable in its way, but to my newly chastened sight I was nobody’s husband.
I realized that my desire was far simpler than its circumstances (as maybe desire always is), and that it proposed things practical and final, not of visions but of this world, and that was where my vision failed. It was as though I had been covered all over for a moment by a beautiful shawl and a cat had caught a raveling and in another moment pulled it all away.
But this was not the end of my love for Mattie Chatham. After the figments of presumption and delusion had all fallen away and I again saw myself as I was and my circumstances as they were, I loved her more, and more clearly, than I did before. I became able to imagine her as she was and not as a subject of a dream. In my thoughts of her, she stood apart from me. I seemed to see her whole. When I realized the futility and absurdity of my old self-begotten desire, that was when the arrow struck. It entered my heart, and I could not pull it out. The hopelessness of my love became the sign of its permanence.
So it is that the life force may take possession of a man—so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.
The thing I must tell about now I did not see happen, but it is as clear to my mind as anything I ever saw. As soon as I heard of it, I could see (and hear) it happening in my mind. I have not been able to think of it since without seeing it happen. And I am not alone in this.
Mattie loved wildflowers. She loved almost everything that grew out of the ground, but wildflowers especially. She loved just to look at them, and she loved to gather them (the ones that would last) in bouquets to take to church. It was always a pleasure to me to go in on Sunday mornings from spring to fall and see her bouquets in a vase on the communion table in front of the pulpit. No two were ever the same, and yet they all stood for her, as they stood in her eyes for the place itself, its beauty that she recognized and so honored.
On a Saturday afternoon late in the fall of that year, Mattie took Liddie with her and went out to gather asters along the side of the road. There was a place where a thickety fencerow ran along the top of the bank that came steeply down to the road ditch. It was on the inside of a rather sharp curve. The bank there was a wild garden of the tall asters whose blooms are purple with yellow centers. They seem to burn and give light in that time when the year is darkening.
Mattie walked among the dry grass stems and the fallen dry leaves and the smaller white-petaled asters called farewell-to-summer, gathering the long-stemmed purple asters and building a sheaf of them in the crook of her left arm. She would carry them into the church in the morning in a vase, and they would look like a torch. The blooms were going past their prime by then and she was working studiously, taking only the freshest ones.
Liddie was five years old, a big girl in her own estimate. She was carrying on a conversation with her mother in which her mother was not participating. And Liddie, coming along behind at her own whim, was not minding at all her mother’s silence. She was carrying on, in a lively and charming way, half a conversation, and her mother would remember this.
While she talked she was pulling off one by one the aster blooms and putting them in her hair. She had her mother’s hair. She was making herself a sort of hat or crown, though it looked like neither and was not tidy or symmetrical, for she had no mirror and was not particularly concerned anyhow.
After a while, when she would perhaps have wanted to look into a mirror if she had had one, she said, “Look, Momma. I’m beautiful.”
When Mattie did not reply or look around, an excitement came over Liddie, for suddenly she knew that she was beautiful and she wanted to be seen. She was seized by a little dance that carried her down off the bank and into the road where her mother could best see her.
“Momma!” she said. “Look how beautiful I am!”
Mattie turned then and saw how beautiful Liddie was, and saw the car that she had not heard or heeded before, and heard within the shriek of braked tires on the blacktop the almost too small impact, and saw Liddie in the air like a tossed doll.
Knowing in that instant that what she saw not only could never be undone but never could be unknown to her ever again in her life, she cried out and ran to Liddie and knelt down. She gathered Liddie into her arms, beautiful indeed with the asters all awry in her hair, and small, and without life.
When I come again to this place in my memory of what I did not see but cannot stop seeing, I must be painstaking in separating the driver from the car. I see him open the door and get out, and I see that he is not a maniac or a demon. He is a boy, maybe twenty, who was not at fault, who was not going too fast, who could not possibly have stopped in time, in the time he had, and yet who knew, getting out and seeing helpless
ly what he had done, that it could not be undone or ever unknown again as long as he would live.
And that is where my seeing in my mind stops. I see them there as if forever: the stricken boy, the mother on her knees at the roadside holding her dead child, the sun suddenly gone beyond the hilltop, and the chill of the evening coming down.
How that moment ends and shifts or evolves into the next moment I do not know and have never imagined. For always I am the first to move; I must get up out of my chair or out of my bed and walk, until the world, as it always does, provides me something more to do.
19
A Gathering
Mat Feltner was sitting on the pedestal of a large gravestone. A tobacco stick held by both hands was propped against the ground in front of him. He was studying the stick as if reading it. He said: “When I was a boy, I had a stickhorse that gave me a lot of trouble. One day I was riding him down toward your shop there, and he threw me. Skinned both of my knees and one elbow, and I didn’t like it atall. When I got on him again, I made him run all the way out to Uncle Dave Coulter’s lane. By the time we turned around and headed back, I had him well in hand and he was satisfied to go at a walk.”
All the trees were bare by then. The tobacco was cured in the barns and a good bit of the corn had been gathered. It was a fine warm afternoon. Mat was doing what he sooner or later got around to doing every fall. He had come up to take care of his people’s graves. Nathan Coulter had come with him and they had brought two or three other hands. Mat had started out in the morning working with the others; in the afternoon, as he tended to do more and more as he got older, he left the work to the younger ones and in the weakened fall sunlight wandered off among the stones, renewing his knowledge of who lay where and of what they had been in their time.